The following is in blog form the substance of a talk I gave Sept 7 at a Mercatus conference, “Monetary Policy Rules for a Post-Crisis World.“ “Rules versus discretion” is a hardy perennial of monetary policy debate, dating from earliest debates between Bullionists and anti-Bullionists, to the 19th century Currency School versus Banking School, up to the 20th century monetarists
Read moreYou can title your conference whatever you want, but the actual content will depend on the speaker list. The convenors of the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium apparently hoped to generate discussion about “Designing Resilient Monetary Policy Frameworks for the Future“. Having read all the papers, I can report that only one of them really engages the conference title. Everyone else
Read moreIn a followup from their much-discussed (by me here) May memo, Pozsar and Sweeney predict “A Turbulent Exit” when the Fed begins to raise rates. FT Alphaville and Bloomberg both appreciate the importance of the memo, but focus attention on the exchange rate dimension, and so miss the main point. Let’s walk through the argument more slowly, so as to
Read moreThe 85th Annual Report of the BIS is not perhaps the obvious first choice for beach-reading on a holiday weekend, but having read through its 119 pages, the core message reminds me of nothing so much as the most memorable line of the 40-year-old summer blockbuster “Jaws”: “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” Notwithstanding everything that has been done since
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